The idea of the new play “brownsville song (b-side for tray)” began during the summer of 2012 when playwright Kimber Lee came across a one-page blog about a youth in the east side of Brooklyn who was accidentally killed, a victim of gun violence.
Several details of the story haunted her, she said during a recent luncheon interview in New York where she lives.
“One, that he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was talking with some friends and there was an argument between two groups and he was caught in the middle of that. Another, was that the his father had died the same way. And I kept thinking about his family and what they were going through and knowing that this was just a little blip in the news.
“I didn’t know what I could do,” she says. “I didn’t live in that neighborhood and I didn’t know this family.”
But she did know how to write plays and Lee took the incident and attempted to bear witness to a promising life that was cut short.
“It’s completely fictional,” she says. “I took some of the basic facts of the situation [from the real-life incident] but as far as the characters and who they are, they are completely invented.”
The play premiered last year at the Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre in Louisville to positive reviews and has since played Philadelphia and New York’s LCT3 Theatre at Lincoln Center. It’s now in previews on the main stage at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre where it will open on Wednesday, April 1. The show continues through April 19.
“I did my best to be truthful and to honor the people whose lives I was writing about,” says the Idaho-born and raised Lee. “But the play wasn’t making any kind of political statement or any pronouncement about the situation in Brownsville. It was really more about the intimate and personal experience of grief and how it affects a family.
“The rest of the stuff I’m not qualified to make so whatever people get from it and however they feel about it, it’s kind of something I can’t control.”
In the play that flows between past and present, Lee focuses on the life of the spirited 18-year-old African American youth who is an aspiring Golden Glove athlete and not just his death, which is dealt with in the first moments of the play.
The spirit of the show is also the inspiration for the play’s title.
“I wanted [it] to be something musical because it felt to me there was something musical in the rhythms of Brooklyn,” she says. And the b-side refers to an earlier era when there were “45s,” small records with one song on each of its sides. “The ‘b’ side was the side that most people didn’t really know about. The title felt right.”
The show, a co-production with the Philadelphia Stage Company, is directed by Long Wharf’s associate artistic director Eric Ting.
The cast includes Curtiss Cook Jr. as Tray and Sung Yun Cho, Catrina Ganey, Anthony Martinez-Briggs and Kaatje Welsh.
Reaching Out To Community
When the show played New York, the theater there reached out to the Brownsville community and offered subsidized tickets.
“The feedback was very positive,” says Lee, “and [the people of the community] were very proud to see themselves represented on a stage at Lincoln Center.”
Some Brownsville people might feel they already know their story and weren’t interested, she says, but others took pride “that they are being seen and having their voice expressed in some kind of way, and that is fantastic.”
Long Wharf is also offering discounted tickets, too, reaching out to people who would not typically attend plays at the theater. Tickets range $5 to $40, compared with the regular range of $45 to $75.
Says the theater’s managing director Joshua Borenstein: “We believe in the importance of this story to move our community and to prompt conversation, so much so that we want to take away this [price] barrier as best we can.”
Other special events surrounding the production are also planned.
On April 9 the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven and Long Wharf Theatre will host a conversation on gun violence, a subject much on the minds of people in New Haven’s neighborhoods. The theater is also working with the New Haven Free Public Library (www.nhfpl.org) to host talks about the play at its branches and to distribute tickets to patrons.
No Stereotypes
Lee says that as more productions of the play are done, more people will understand Brownsville and she hopes people “should not be demonized as a dark violent ghetto in a stereotypical way because it doesn’t reflect the full range of humanity there.”
As a Korean-American woman, she can relate to people placing plays, places and people in one category or another.
After she wrote the play, some people thought she was an African-American playwright.
“People assume a lot of things,” she says. “I was told by a woman of color [whom she was meeting with about the play] that she was expecting to see a young woman of color to walk through the door. When someone says something like that, I take it as a compliment that the voice [of the play] is feeling authentic to people.”
But in another way, she says, it just brings home to her the way people want “to categorize human beings and put them in a box.”
“I don’t set out to write things because I’m trying to fool people,” she says. “It’s just something that captures my attention and sticks inside of me somewhere and that I keep coming back to.”
Another play of Lee’s “Tokyo Fish Story,” just opened at South Coast Repertory Theatre in California that is set in a sushi restaurant in Japan.
“Some people assumed I was Japanese or I grew up in a sushi restaurant. It’s all very interesting.”
Lee says she wrote that play because she became fascinated with the idea of traditions and the modern questions that it raises.
“I love the rituals and beauty and the search for perfection [in the art of sushi-making] but there are things that are problematic to the way we live now. It’s not terribly inclusive and women don’t get to do it at the highest level, especially in Japan — and there is no good reason for it. There are a lot of excuses for it, but they’re all bull crap,” she says laughing.
Another unexpected setting for the petite Lee is a play located in the world of a boxing gym. “When my parents saw it they’re thinking, ‘Where is all this coming from?’.”
The former actress who turned to writing when she found that there was a low ceiling for Asian-American performers, has a theory.
“I think I have felt like an outsider my entire life, orbiting around people, always on the fringes. And I think that means I was able to have a varied kind of experiences.”
Also ahead for the playwright is a month-long residency in London at the end of the summer. Currently she is this season’s Aetna New Voices playwright at Hartford Stage. She hasn’t made up her mind about what she is going to write as her commissioned play, one of many she has from several theaters. She is considering reworking that boxing play that she says she still wants to develop.
Two years ago, shortly after she received her MFA in playwriting at the University of Texas at Austin, she started boxing and spars in gyms. Something you wouldn’t expect as well.
“brownsville song (b-side for tray)” is now in previews and opens on Wednesday, April 1. The show runs through April 19 at Long Wharf Theatre’s main stage at 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven. The play is 90 minutes and is performed without intermission. Information: 203-787-4282 and longwharf.org.
